Heroes of Running: Louie Zamperini

Running helped Zamperini foster the resilience he needed to endure captivity during WWII.

It was the spring of 1944, the height of World War II. In a Japanese torture camp, a captured American stood, ravaged by illness and shockingly emaciated, surrounded by guards clutching clubs and baseball bats.

His name was Louie Zamperini, and he'd once been a luminous track prodigy. Lifted from juvenile delinquency by running, he set a U.S. high school mile record that stood for 19 years, and an NCAA mile record that lasted for 20. As a teenager in 1936, he placed eighth in the Olympic 5000 in only his sixth race at the distance. By 1940, he was an Olympic 1500-meter favorite, the man many predicted would be the first to break the four-minute mile.

But war had canceled the Olympics, and Zamperini had become an airman. When his plane crashed in the Pacific on May 27, 1943, he began an astounding 2,000-mile raft journey, enduring leaping sharks, a typhoon, and enemy strafing, only to be captured by the Japanese. They'd beaten him, starved him, conducted medical experiments on him, and would soon enslave him. Now, learning that he'd been an Olympian, they were going to force him to race.

Surely hoping to humiliate the American, the guards summoned a Japanese runner to face him. Zamperini had no choice: If he said no, every captive would be beaten.

Running on legs so slender his skin hung loose around them, Zamperini soon fell behind. But as he ran, other captives began gathering to watch. They were exhausted and sometimes broken men, victims of relentless torture, but as they watched the runners, the hollowness left their eyes. Zamperini saw it in their faces: They needed him to win.

A prisoner's slightest infraction could get him beaten to death, so Zamperini knew he could die for winning. But on his final lap, the captives began cheering him on. He made his choice. Zamperini pushed hard, passed his rival, and won. The last thing he heard, as the guard's club swung into his skull, was a chorus of voices shouting in triumph.

Though he was clubbed unconscious that day, Zamperini, now 96, has never regretted his choice. Injuries incurred in slavery ended his racing career, but he has carried running's lessons through his long and singularly vigorous life. At the Southern California sports camp he built himself, thousands of troubled kids would turn their lives around. And in devoting the last 60 years to sharing the message in his history, he's inspired generations of listeners--runners and couch-sitters alike--with the story of how running saved him in his youth and fostered the resilience he needed to endure his war saga, and how he found forgiveness for his captors.

In 1998, 80-year-old Louie Zamperini, still an avid athlete, returned to Japan to run once more, this time as a torchbearer for the Nagano Olympics. He ran not as the gold medalist he'd once hoped to be but as something far greater. He was an ambassador of inspiration.

Laura Hillenbrand's biography of Louie Zamperini, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption (Random House), was published in 2010.